4chan is a fantastic way to see where opinion will go in the future in my opinion.
4chan is very contrarian, usually against the leading opinion. The narratives discussed in its boards usually slowly starts to influence more mainstream targets, starting with reddit, 9gag equivalents, meme, eventually Facebook until it becomes mainstream enough, leading 4chan to abandon it and switch sides.
4chan used to be quite liberal, a long time ago, then the "mainstream" opinion went to liberal. In the last few years 4chan became very conservative (/pol/ especially) and convervative & reactionary movements are now what they are, growing in Europe, trump got elected, etc.
Now, slighly, you can see 4chan moving away from strong conservative & reactionist views to a more low-key liberal view, again. /pol/ opinions start to get rejected or mocked by other boards, people are bored with the constant alt-right spam and I believe this will leak into mainstream media in few years, that will be the next turn in mainstream opinion.
Don't you think you're giving 4Chan a little too much credit for the phenomenon you're describing here? It's likely that 4Chan acts as a haven for the fringes (which are always changing) but claiming 4Chan has a direct and predictable impact on public opinion globally is a bit of a stretch.
Don't get me wrong, I am well aware of 4Chan's influence on internet culture and how things go viral by the will of 4Chan. But even still I think you're ascribing 4Chan a little too much credit here.
I don't believe 4chan is "moving" all the opinion by itself, it's just reflecting the contrarian's opinion and has some influence which expose their opinion to other more mainstream groups
The post didn't say anything about "value" in terms of money
good enough to raise money, or good enough to keep working on a feature or product, or good enough to believe the product will grow into something much bigger someday.
In the last sense, 4chan is probably in the top 10 of websites that have impacted the web/world the greatest over the last 15 years.
I would absolutely say the top. They started meme culture, which has absolutely taken over most of the social media sites.
/pol/ started the extreme Trump support, and made supporting him fun and memey, ultimately leading to /r/The_Donald, and his eventual election to POTUS. That has had quite a large effect on the world.
They've done gobs and gobs of things related to VG, hoaxes, cultural obstruction, etc.
They are quite influential, just not in the way we typically think about influence.
Actually, the goons at somethingawful.com were doing that long before 4chan, and 4chan itself is a copycat of the japanese 2ch forums. They certainly did lead the way with all that stuff later on, but I'm sure there was a lot of cross-pollination by that point, and I doubt somethingawful can take credit as being the first, either.
I didn't mean they originated the type of environment, but that they are the most influential at creating a real widespread culture and propagating that culture to the wider internet. Goons tended to just be total assholes to specific targets, or organizing things within some videogames (Eve Online, etc.)
/r9k/ played a big role in the whole incel thing, Elliot Rogers was treated as a sort of deity there before he went on a rampage.
Are there any serious, in-depth studies, stories or books or whatever about 4chan? I feel like politically and culturally, 4chan is one of the most important sites on the internet. I'd like to read more on its influence
>Are there any serious, in-depth studies, stories or books or whatever about 4chan? I feel like politically and culturally, 4chan is one of the most important sites on the internet. I'd like to read more on its influence
I'm friends with the author and we were pretty close with when she was writing this. She would tell me about her research, which involved a lot of lurking on 4chan and talking with people there in an official journalistic capacity. I haven't read the book, but it might be worth a peek. She was very much interested in not dismissing it as sociopathic boy behavior, but in understanding what drives intelligent people to troll.
> /r9k/ played a big role in the whole incel thing, Elliot Rogers was treated as a sort of deity there before he went on a rampage.
I'm pretty sure this only started afterwards, but I could be wrong. There are histories of 4chan, but they are usually incomplete since the number of users who kept track of things all the way from the beginning are few.
Not necessarily. In my opinion, core metric should be a proxy for the value the product provides. For example, for us at https://ouraring.com, people buy the ring before using the product.
Tracking revenue only would not reveal problems in the long-term benefit of the product - it would be more like a proxy for marketing actions, not for the core product benefit.
From another wearable founder [1] to you, congrats on making a great product! I'm wearing the new steel Oura right now. Although the firmware update this week broke it for me on android :(
Still my favorite heart-rate enabled wearable out there!
But the parent was picking one metric to measure the health of a business, not a product. If you choose to measure the health of your business by the quality of your product, aren't you just creating a potentially misleading proxy? Good products hardly guarantee the success of a business.
Like most business talk on HN, this is about YC-style startups that are expected to lose a lot of money up front in exchange for a ticket in a lottery where the winner is the next Facebook.
Net revenue CHANGE might be the one metric that makes sense.
The reason to track any metric is to know if you should continue, stop, or go all-in. If you are flatlining - or going down - that's a HUGE sign to quit. If you have steady growth, easy as she goes. Explosive growth, you might want to double down.
Revenue is a reflection of market value, not an intrinsic measurement. Measuring the unit economics should capture more of the intrinsic metrics that generate revenue. This would then be the essence of a company's North star metric.
This is for pre-revenue companies. The expectation is that se will turn into revenue in many tech business models. Certainly for the type where you have to capture a dominant fraction of users to get the hockey stick curve.
> This whole time I thought it was Profit. Stupid me.
You could be profitable with 1 user that pays way more than the rest (e.g. the only "business plan" user, or an user that use the application more than the others on a usage-based plan). If losing that customer means going out of business than the company is not healthy.
Or maybe there are other metrics that matter.